Four Chthonic Praise-Chants & One Lament
by Christien Gholson
Sun Over The City of Rocks New Mexico Chthonic Praise-Chant
16,000 Year Old Carved Spear-Thrower Tip Chthonic Praise-Chant
Sirius Rising Over Picacho Peak Chthonic Praise-Chant
Empty Road in Taos Chthonic Praise-Chant
Lament for Snow Blowing off the Roof under Grey Skies
Author’s Note: These poems are from a new manuscript called Twenty Chthonic Praise-Chants & One Lament (after Neruda’s first book, Twenty Love Poems and A Song of Despair). I wrote the bulk of these praise-chants in the fall of 2019, when overwhelming fear and sorrow were constantly moving through me from news about the current mass extinction taking place across the planet.
At the same time, I realized that deep grief is a form of praise for those things we have deeply loved (See Martn Prechtel’s The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief & Praise). With this in mind, the “chants” developed out of my desire to record my own personal ecstasy in the presence of so many things outside the human realm. That ecstasy includes the realm of death—the underworld, the depth of the earth itself, the chthonic, grief and praise—how they burst onto the senses together.
Sun Over The City of Rocks New Mexico Chthonic Praise-Chant
Hideous sun flesh-devourer eating its own children Hideous sun holding all shadows hostage in an eternal red season Red-creator vaporizing scattered rain across this plain before it reaches my mouth Ant-tyrant slow-chewing a half-dead dragonfly in my mouth Savage holy fire that turned me into a raven blinking newborn Singes black feathers off my shoulders Separates water from the mind makes my legs walk incoherent circles Hideous mystery I saw you out walking this morning scraping harsh light across yucca elata flowers My burnt raven-mind has given you everything and is still invisible to you You ask for sacrifice of the eye the finger these feathers You ask for a wound so you can enter my raven-body and burn shadows onto the walls of my organs Fury messenger gouging light from all raven-secrets Skin-flayer the grimace of the Triassic fern pattern crucified on stone half-buried in sand While the wind is as still as possible trying so hard not to be seen And darkling beetles tunnel into shadows their own size Raven-Killer sun The promised son-assassin with black gloves pulls the last breath out of my laughing black beak Terror sun my father who sends orange fried-dust skittering over the edge Hideous No-Shadow-Judge who reveals everything and so reveals nothing Hideous Unknowable sun reveals my feather gown to me My claws score a scorch-fissure that marks the boundary between worlds Who will cross who will break this hunt without water this stalemate without water Your face in mine Lifted to you
16,000 Year Old Carved Spear-Thrower Tip Chthonic Praise-Chant
So many names without animal now back then too many to name White ibex carved at the tip of the antler spear-thrower Doe’s ass lifted reveals a birth sac on which two birds perch To sing a birth song a death song A hypnotic tragic-mask soft-shoe So many names without animal now back then so many to name I place a long-distance night-call back 16,000 years Ask the prophet-birds if they sang of a new world birthed with a chorus of bison chanting grass into being with bees that name themselves So many names without animal now back then so many to name Did the birth save us from that strange hour when elder-dreams drowned children in their sleep Who pierced the black lacquered eye-shine of the palearctic water beetle into existence To sing a birth song a death song A hypnotic tragic-mask soft-shoe So many names without animal now back then so many to name A profusion of furred alleys inside the embryo Harmonics of dust inside the wriggling pupa Faces at the edge of fire-light Refugees from the future so hungry begging for their souls back So many names without animal now back then so many to name Names like ichor-squeezed-from-the tide-pull-of-Sirius Names like ant-antennae-woven-around-the-nails-of-a-juniper-claw Names spoken by fire by stone by mist by the clear eyes of water rats To sing a birth song a death song A hypnotic tragic-mask soft-shoe So many names without animal now I wait for the one who struggles from the sac who bellows at the dead fern to keep the sun revolving in its socket Who will speak the original name of the grey dhole so that it will appear
Sirius Rising Over Picacho Peak Chthonic Praise-Chant
Sirius is engaged ancestor-light engaged ancestor-distance changing now blue now red now green My head flies into the earth with the light cupped between my paws Sirius is engaged ancestor-light how it travels down the carnival chute to the eye before I was born Eight point six light years that almost eternal thread transforms the body tortures the body Sirius is engaged ancestor-light and I become ancient as I wait for the sacrament White-fire gaze of Sopdet floods the Nile holds up the night sky Black water drains into black water Sirius is engaged to Sah but refuses Sah shines so bright it breaks desire in two Sirius is engaged ancestor-light it hovers inside a twist of bare branches an idea-knife prying me open I grow rabid teeth to bite the ley lines I whirl and wait like a vortex of feathers inside the light Sirius is engaged ancestor-light carves the pattern of longing across my forehead I am a beast-manuscript that tells the tale of the horror-space that light has crossed Sirius is engaged ancestor-light invades my grimace my lonely cry invades the way I lope off into the darkness
Empty Road in Taos Chthonic Praise-Chant
Everything is dying the way it does Airplane bottles of vodka gin whiskey scattered in sun-thistle Dead straw-corolla heads bowed Kindling for a drunken wildfire Everything is dying the way it does Everything an ash-announcement for something or someone Here parachute seeds fell to earth Stars that wanted to know what it would be like on this plot of earth this flesh End up paper trash wind-tortured incoherent Too many slurred words Everything is dying the way it does And everything is dying the way it hasn’t done before Smoke along the ridge Extinction and love Extinction and confusion Paper rattles against sage tries to tell its story I was here and then I was there and no one will remember Everything is dying the way it does I can’t make out the words of tossed bottles or lost cat posters gone to coyotes one and all Stones that line the road are counterpoint blades of clarity precise as Manjushri’s sword Everything is dying the way it does And everything is dying the way it hasn’t done before Last grey grasshoppers are footsteps following me Awkward wings shoot the sun and miss Friends long dead seen for a few seconds at the corner of the eye escape into abandoned prairie dog holes Everything is dying the way it does Two blue birds follow me once a part of my body Milkweed seeds inside dried-skin pods pull me down I lift them let them fly Parachutes over sage flats float to where they were always going to land
Lament for Snow Blowing off the Roof under Grey Skies
There is loss it skins the world raw Sloughs off tomorrow and tomorrow blots out the stars scrapes snow-dust across snow-hives Tears snow through snow a junco blown into last night’s window Unfathomable loss no raven or angel eye can plumb it I must forget how snow can peel back the skin This is the loss snow-dust an illusion while it happens Snow-dust that flies already gone I long for raven wing on a fence-post mice who dream snow-crust into existence packrat-cell beneath floorboards double oval of deer prints in mud while they are still here I must forget the snow as it falls There is loss indistinguishable from my death who stands beside me wearing a late Paleozoic snow-cloak When I go snow-blind there’s nothing left but voices on the wind calling to themselves hunting their former bodies Look at how they ache and cry and skin the air I must forget how all the cats in the world lift their open mouths to catch the flying snow This is the loss standing on the shoreline with my first child watching snow fall into the sea Whitecap-embrace of water with water thinking how many times it will happen in the years to come and it has not come again Death’s hands are cold so cold but hold me so close I have already forgotten the murder-cry in the magpie’s blue feather I spin with snow-dust become snow-dust for maybe the last time To feel snow-dust blow through the heart into a cavern of masks and stub-candles held by disembodied claws Our hands and tongues and thighs become shadow-mutations because of such loss How can I forget the way snow collects on your hat your cheeks eyelashes brightens your eyes This is the loss words torn off roofs names without bodies No I would become snow I would I would sacrifice my body for the body of snow the slide of a blue whale’s back against ocean ice the arctic hare’s leap the snow leopard’s eye from behind snow-driven stone No I will not forget
Christien Gholson is the author of several books of poetry, including All the Beautiful Dead (Bitter Oleander Press), and On the Side of the Crow (Hanging Loose Press, re-issued by Parthian Books in the UK); along with a novel, A Fish Trapped Inside the Wind (Parthian Books). Other work at Mudlark includes the long poems Kill-Floor, The Sixth Sense, The Black Edge, and the eco-catastrophe-ceremony poem, Tidal Flats. The sequel to Tidal Flats, Solutions for the End of the World, can be found at The American Journal of Poetry. Gholson himself can infrequently be found on his blog: noise & silence. He lives in New Mexico.
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